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Mark Fahad

@markfahad

Message

Staff data engineer designing secure batch/streaming data platforms that cut cloud costs.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to lead secure, governed cloud data platforms—owning batch/streaming architecture, reliability, and cost—while mentoring engineers and delivering analytics and AI-ready data products.

I’m a Staff Data Engineer with 10+ years of experience architecting data platforms across healthcare, financial services, ecommerce, and consulting. I’ve delivered batch and streaming systems processing 5M+ daily events and 50+ production workflows while reducing cloud infrastructure costs by 45% and Snowflake spend by 30%.

I specialize in Python, SQL, Spark/Databricks, Snowflake, and orchestration with Airflow and dbt, with Kafka and CDC at the core of my streaming and operational integrations. As a technical lead, I define architecture, strengthen governance and reliability, and deliver secure data products for analytics and AI, including feature store and ML data pipelines.

I also focus on production excellence—workspace governance, Unity Catalog, cluster policies, cost monitoring, testing, and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and CI/CD. Across roles, I’ve built governed warehouses, CDC-driven analytics, HIPAA-compliant pipelines, and reusable data models, and I mentor teams to standardize documentation, lineage, and support.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Staff Data Engineer

Current

WestonChaseTechnologies

Apr 2023 - Present (3 years 2 months)

Led architecture and delivery of cloud batch, streaming, and ML data solutions, reducing infrastructure spend by 45% through an AWS migration and workload redesign. Built Kafka and Spark Structured Streaming pipelines processing 5M events/day and governed Databricks operations for 50+ production workflows using Terraform and monitoring.

AWS Kafka Spark Structured Streaming Databricks Delta Lake Unity Catalog Terraform Great Expectations Airflow

Senior Data Engineer

SundaysforDogs

Mar 2020 - Mar 2023 (3 years)

Architected a Snowflake analytics warehouse using Kimball dimensional models for a platform serving 2M users and operated Fivetran, dbt, and Airflow ELT pipelines ingesting 20+ sources. Reduced Snowflake spend by 30% via rightsizing, clustering, incremental models, and SQL optimization, and improved stock visibility via Kafka-based inventory event pipelines.

Snowflake Fivetran DBT Apache Airflow Kafka Python Entity Resolution Reverse ETL

Data Engineer

BlackbirdHealth

Jun 2017 - Feb 2020 (2 years 8 months)

Deployed HIPAA-compliant AWS pipelines and an encrypted S3 data lake to transform claims and EHR data into trusted analytics products. Orchestrated 50+ daily Airflow workflows and reduced report generation time by 50% through dimensional dataset tuning and PostgreSQL optimization, while decreasing manual data errors by 40% using reconciliation controls.

AWS AWS S3 Apache Airflow PostgreSQL CDC Python SQL Cloudwatch

ETL Developer

LionTree

Aug 2015 - May 2017 (1 year 9 months)

Authored Python and SQL ETL pipelines integrating API, fixed-width, delimited, JSON, and XML financial/transaction data for risk analysis, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting. Supported migrations of data workloads from on-prem to AWS and improved performance via indexing and SQL tuning, while streamlining manual checks and improving operational visibility.

Python SQL ETL REST APIs AWS Migration Indexing SQL Tuning Data Validation